


Words Long Gone, Lost on Journeys We Walked On

by sonnie



Category: Sicario (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-25 10:12:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4956313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonnie/pseuds/sonnie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kate takes the least important words of advice that Reggie ever gave her.</p><p> </p><p>Or the one where Kate doesn’t like being anywhere, because she hasn’t found a place where her skin doesn’t crawl, where her eyes don’t well up with tears, where she feels like she can close her eyes without opening them to find Alejandro tracking her movements from across the room, so she goes shopping because damn, Ted almost saw a tragically ugly bra.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Words Long Gone, Lost on Journeys We Walked On

It’s the safest she’s felt in days.

Standing half naked and vulnerable under commercial fluorescent lights in the dressing room of a department store in her underwear, Kate _finally_ feels like danger’s not right around the corner. Matt’s not going to knock on the door and whisk her away to _El Paso._ Dave’s not going to tell her that she’s getting a whole new set of rules to live by that are written by the CIA. Alejandro’s not waiting behind fluttering curtain panels to force her to sign away the only thing she limped away from that mission with: her integrity.

The bruises dotting her ribcage from being manhandled by Matt are still vivid, and she fucking hates how everything she went through means nothing to people like him. She’s FBI, goddamn it. She can hold her own, and if she’s not up to snuff according to some Black Ops assholes, that’s fine with her. It doesn’t stop her from looking as weak as she feels standing in front of the mirror in plain cotton panties. The marks around her neck remain and she’s still got a hell of a shiner. Having basically subsisted on coffee and nicotine, she’s seen battered cokeheads that look better.

She can safely say she’s having the worst week ever. Two team members got killed in the raid where they found dozens of corpses, and it made her want to stop a drug lord. Naturally. And _yeah_ , he’s been stopped, but _she_ didn’t do a damned thing. Sure, she was present while other people made decisions on what to do. She let herself be manipulated and used as bait and Jesus, nearly got killed just trying to get laid. She got double-tapped in her bullet-proof vest when she tried to uphold the law when Alejandro went rogue. She was held at gunpoint by someone who was supposed to be a “good guy” but was not a _good guy_. Raids and shootouts in drug dens by scumbag dealers wasn’t getting the job done, but being helpless and nearly passive sure did, and what a fucking job it was.

Kate indulged in some self-help garbage after her divorce before realizing that she was strong enough to stomp on her heartbreak until everything stopped hurting so much. And maybe it wasn’t actually strength, but just being able to do what she had to in order to retain control. She’s trying to reclaim her life or some such bullshit, which is why she didn’t protest too much when an eager shop girl ten years her junior made a few selections for her. Kate’s got a pile of bras dumped all over a chair in colors that aren’t white and don’t look like something a grandmother would pick out. Hell, she can wear anything under her baggy tees and rumpled thermals and no one will ever see but Reggie. And after the last guy she tried to have sex with ended up strangling her on a motel room floor, it’ll likely be _only_ Reggie for a good, long while.

 _I didn’t know making a difference would make such a difference in_ me _. I didn’t even do anything and I’ve changed._

After taking five minutes to pick a color to try on first, Kate’s glad Alejandro didn’t empty an entire clip into her; her chest isn’t much to look at anyway, not even in what is a snazzy-by-her-standards black t-shirt bra. It accentuates her paleness and how her frame has slid from rangy towards flat-out skinny. She stands very close to the mirror and peers carefully down at her breast, at the two welts less than an inch apart. She’s definitely been hurt worse (being blown up certainly comes to mind) but this is as intimate as the fingerprints that circle her neck. It’s a breach of trust that’s devastating on so many levels.

It was terrifying to be at the mercy of someone who had expressed, to what was probably the extent of his ability, real fondness for her, and know that even though he really didn’t _want_ to kill her, it wouldn’t be a problem for him if she forced his hand. That after he would have pulled the trigger, he’d pad around her apartment and make sure it was perfectly staged to look like a suicide—that he’d walk away and not feel much of anything except perhaps a momentary twinge of exasperation. Alejandro used to be like her, so by-the-book and lawful and righteous that he was a fucking DA. It took the brutal execution of his wife and daughter to craft him into the man he was today, a transformation that gave him the power to change the world but left him ill-equipped to live in it.

Kate realizes there isn’t anyone in the world that she cares enough about that losing them could make her into a heartless killer, and she isn’t sure how she feels about that knowledge. Is she a worse person than he is, for not loving anyone that much? Is her conviction less, because she needs to remain a better person than the people she wants to bring down, for that being _important_ to her?

_Losing people like me creates people like him—people that aren’t even human anymore. Revenge is meaningless if you feel nothing._

Unfastening the black bra, Kate stares awkwardly at the little plastic hanger it came on. She’s not exactly good at this kind of thing. It doesn’t look quite right, but after a moment she manages to hang it back up; she doesn’t like to leave a mess. She tries on another in a pretty jewel-green color and finds it makes her appear a little less wan. She still looks frail and washed out, but somehow better than she did in the black one. It might all be in her imagination.

The knock on the dressing room door doesn’t have Kate automatically reaching for her sidearm, which she congratulates herself on. It’s just the sales clerk asking her if she’s alright, because trying on two bras has somehow stretched into fifteen minutes. Taking a deep breath, Kate informs her she’s fine (ha) and that she’s just having trouble deciding on a color. After a cheerful reply, Kate is left alone again, and feels her shoulders sag. She doesn’t even try on the rest, just picks out a few based on which colors repulse her least and purchases them. She’ll take them home and never wear them and tell herself that they’re there for the next time she needs them, whenever the hell that is.

The knowledge that Ted nearly saw one of her granny bras probably bothers Reggie more than it bothers her. But she’ll pretend that this is control, that this is change, that this is being prepared. She’ll pretend that this makes her different in a substantial way than how she was yesterday. While she doesn’t like being in her apartment; she doesn’t like leaving it. She doesn’t like being anywhere, because she hasn’t found a place where her skin doesn’t crawl, where her eyes don’t well up with tears, where she feels like she can close her eyes without opening them to find Alejandro tracking her movements from across the room.

But Kate wasn’t brave enough to leave yesterday. She was today. She isn’t better or fine or even okay, but she will be. Divorce taught her that a woman rebuilt is never the same, and that doesn’t make her feel better or fine or okay either, but she doesn't have a choice. Despite their best efforts, Matt and Alejandro have left her with enough pieces to stay human. The price of changing the world is higher than what she wants to pay, but she knows that now. She’s witnessed the highest level of this war, and knows what you have to lose and what you have to be to fight and win it. She'll pick at the surface without scratching it, and it will have to be enough because the next time Kate fires a weapon, it’s not going to be into a car where a through-and-through could hit a civilian sitting in sedan the next lane over. She’s not going to use her colleagues as bait to lure out a hitman into the open so he can be beaten and tortured for information. She’s not going to threaten anyone by thrusting the barrel of her gun under their chin, especially not over a piece of paper.

With a flick of her wrist, Kate dumps her bras on the kitchen counter so she can cut off the tags, and after a flash of fuchsia, teal, and cornflower blue, she remembers the way Alejandro leaned against that same counter after he called her in off the balcony. He had said that she was scared and weak and had not made it seem like those were really all that bad things to be feeling or even be. Maybe because it had been so long since he felt anything?

_I’m probably the only person whose home he’s ever snuck into that got away with their life._

Kate is not a coward; if she dies in the line of duty, it's going to be a shotgun blast when she's kicking down a door, not getting murdered by a cartel hitman in her apartment. CIA bullshit is not what she signed up for. Oh hell, she doesn't even know what she signed up for anymore. No one really told her anything except a bottom line that seemed like a great idea at the time. And yes, they did take Fausto Alarcon down, but by the end of the week he'd be replaced, hopefully by someone easier to control, at least until he suddenly wasn't.

Suddenly, Kate feels a spike of anxiety at the thought of being another one of Alejandro's victims. No one would know the truth, except maybe Reggie, who'd go off and get himself killed too trying to shed light on what had happened. Kate rushes to the bathroom to rinse her face with water and thinks of how many times in the past few days she's used water to rinse away every bad thing that's happened. She recalls how Alejandro had come by to check on her after saving her from Ted. She also recalls how she was naïve enough in the first place to walk into that bank (fucking cameras) and put a target on her back and how mad she got at Matt for not warning her when maybe she should have thought of it herself. Alejandro had said she reminded him of someone special to him at one moment and had fired bullets into her vest at another. He'd wiped her tears while holding her at gunpoint and tried to direct her towards a life where she’d be safer and happier and what the actual fuck was that about?

In the mirror, she’s hopelessly pale and her gaze is frosty and maybe tomorrow she’ll remember to wear concealer so she stops getting so many curious and pitying looks when she leaves. They don’t know the half of it. None of it will make her look less like the girl Alejandro sees when he looks at her. Kate will chew another piece of nicotine gum and try not to drink any more booze and maybe never watch Breaking Bad ever again, but try her best to be her new normal. She sold her soul to keep her own life, but it’s still a life worth saving.

As she gets ready for bed, Kate recalls how Alejandro ordered her to never point a weapon at him again. And she’d been ready to shoot him, because she was a different person then. But the next day, after dissembling the gun, he still left it for her to use. He must have known she wouldn’t shoot him, or perhaps he didn’t care. Or maybe he knew she would have to settle for letting men like him loose on the world to change it for her, so she could continue to be the type of person that made it worth changing for. Kate’s eyes drift shut, and her last thought before falling asleep is that she can still claw her way back to becoming a person she can live with again; she still wants to try. She can start tomorrow.

**Author's Note:**

> I will eventually work towards Alejandro/Kate and probably write 20,000 words that I'll never post, so I'll settle for this for now.


End file.
